SXSW: Bringing tech to the masses

There’s a lot of developer talk and geek speak at South by Southwest, with attendees discussing everything from coding to hardware.

But a number of startups at the conference this year are pitching products that help make technology easier to use and more accessible to the masses. Here’s a glimpse at a few I ran into at the conference:

Lifeyo and SnapPages: Makes it easy for anyone to make a Web site, with drag and drop features for photos and other items you might want to upload to the site. Lifeyo hosts the site on its server with a URL that includes its name, though for a fee it will register a personalized domain name for you.

Mobile Roadie: Letting everyone build an iPhone app, with a simple user interface for those that don’t aren’t programmers. How long such companies will last, however, is up for debate now that Apple has moved to remove generic and "cookie cutter" apps from its store.

Another common theme seems to be the burden of information overload for social media junkies. There are so many streams of information to track, from Twitter and Facebook to apps that let users stream their latest credit card purchase or what song has their ear.

He’d like to see services that take all the data users are voluntarily putting out there and make it useful to enrich people’s lives and help them make better decisions, rather than using it for targeted advertising.

For example, integrating a person’s scheduling data on the Mac’s iCal calendar program with Flickr photos and music they’re listening to could be used to create a soundtrack to a person’s life. By aggregating all the data, it could reveal what a person was projecting to the world at a particular time in their life, from a death in the family to a new birth.